The Promise of American Life eBook

The rulers of the continental states in the eighteenth
century explained and excused every important action
they took by what was called “La Raison d’Etat”—­that
is, by reasons connected with the public safety which
justified absolute authority and extreme measures.
But as a matter of fact this absolute authority, instead
of being confined in its exercise to matters in which
the public safety was really concerned, was wasted
and compromised chiefly for the benefit of a trivial
domestic policy and a merely dynastic foreign policy.
At home the exercise of absolute authority was not
limited to matters and occasions which really raised
questions of public safety. In their foreign policies
the majority of the states had little idea of the
necessary and desirable limits of their own aggressive
power. Those limits were imposed from without;
and when several states could combine in support of
an act of international piracy, as in the case of
the partition of Poland, Europe could not be said
to have any effective system of public law. The
partition of Poland, which France could and should
have prevented, was at once a convincing exposure
of the miserable international position to which France
had been reduced by the Bourbons, and the best possible
testimony to the final moral bankruptcy of the political
system of the eighteenth century.

II

THE IMPLICATIONS OF NATIONAL DEVELOPMENT

In 1789 the bombshell of the French Revolution exploded
under this fabric of semi-national and semi-despotic,
but wholly royalist and aristocratic, European political
system. For the first time in the history of
European nations a national organization and tradition
was confronted by a radical democratic purpose and
faith. The two ideas have been face to face ever
since; and European history thereafter may, in its
broadest aspect, be considered as an attempt to establish
a fruitful relation between them. In the beginning
it looked as if democracy would, so far as it prevailed,
be wholly destructive of national institutions and
the existing international organization. The insurgent
democrats sought to ignore and to eradicate the very
substance of French national achievement. They
began by abolishing all social and economic privileges
and by framing a new polity based in general upon the
English idea of a limited monarchy, partial popular
representation, and equal civil rights; but, carried
along by the momentum of their ideas and incensed
by the disloyalty of the king and his advisers and
the threat of invasion they ended by abolishing royalty,
establishing universal suffrage and declaring war
upon every embodiment, whether at home or abroad,
of the older order. The revolutionary French democracy
proclaimed a creed, not merely subversive of all monarchical
and aristocratic institutions, but inimical to the
substance and the spirit of nationality. Indeed
it did not perceive any essential distinction between